After a prisoner died, his family received word from prison officials. It may have been the terse telegram of an unexpected death, when the speed of decay and expense of embalming demanded a quick, if unsympathetic, notification. Rosie Wilson received a telegram about her son, Johnnie. To say that the message is succinct is to put it mildly:

Letters were more predictable in the case of an execution, when the death was planned well in advance. Prisoners' families received form letters from the warden, informing them that they needed to arrange for the removal of their family member’s body after execution. If they could afford the expense, a mortician would pick up the body and return it to the family. A 1941 letter explained: ‘If you intend to claim the body, please have the undertaker advise this office by letter immediately. If you do not wish to claim the body, burial will take place in the Prison Cemetery here in Huntsville with full Christian rites.’ And to set the family at ease — as much as possible, under the circumstances of state execution: ‘[P]lease rest assured that everything possible is being done to make your brother's last hours as happy as is possible under such conditions, and the Prison Chaplain is in constant attendance.’^[62]

Yet many prisoners’ families could not afford to claim their remains, and were less fortunate than Johnnie Wilson, whose mother sent for his body. One of Elmer Pruitt's parents responded to the warden’s letter: ‘Many thanks to you for the information. It is my desire to claim the body of my hopeless son, but I am unable, financially, to bear the expense.’ Pruitt, a black man convicted of murder in Henderson County, was executed 30 May 1937 and presumably buried at the state cemetery in Huntsville, known to inmates as Peckerwood Hill.^[63]

Indigent prisoners, and this was not an inconsiderable number, might hope for a burial suit to be provided from the prison, as well as a coffin. The suit was almost certainly sewn by women prisoners at the Goree Farm, who made all of the work clothes worn in the prison, and the discharge suits worn by prisoners who were fortunate enough to walk rather than be carried out, and luckier still than those who never left. The coffins, too, were likely made in the prison carpentry shop. If inmate carpenters could build ‘Old Sparky’, it stands to reason that they could build a few dozen rough coffins each year.^[64]

Prisoners whose families couldn’t or wouldn’t claim their bodies were seen to, then, by prison officials, and the prison chaplains oversaw their burial. This, too, was a vital part of their role in the prison. The matter-of-fact tone in Annual Reports belied a deeper sentiment in this Chaplain’s ministrations:

C. E. Garret, who tended to the spiritual wellbeing of white Protestants in the ‘upper sector’ of the prison system, oversaw some 29 burials in 1940 alone.^[66]

These meagre services were hardly the grisly mass spectacles of death at the hands of the lynch mob. Indeed, almost no one would be there to witness the death, however it happened, or the burial, wherever it took place. If they did witness it, as was the case with Cecil Davis, they spoke about it only reluctantly. But it was also different from the post-Reconstruction lynch mob because during the depression, poor whites, now understood as ‘white trash’, joined African Americans and Mexicans at Peckerwood Hill: imprisoned, in the main, for property crimes, but also rape, murder, and assault; dead from medical neglect and from overwork, from hatred and electrocution. This new regime was far different from the lynch mob, but if this was progress, it was the kind described by Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man: ‘It moved not like an arrow but like a boomerang, and if you were poor, black, or both, it was best to have a steel helmet handy, because it could come back and knock you down.’^[67]

* * *

In his history of lynch violence in the American South, historian W. Fitzhugh Brundage has cautioned against seeing clear continuity between lynch violence and forms of modern criminal justice. While acknowledging the racism of more recent prison systems, Brundage writes that ‘no legal lynching could convey the full, frightful symbolism of white supremacy that lynching by seething mobs had once conveyed’.^[68] This is undoubtedly true. But white supremacy remained, transformed, arguably more thorough in its institutional banality than in earlier, more visible versions. In a perverse sense, the lack of frightful symbolism bespoke the complexity of the new system.^[69] And when linked to the racial code of ‘criminality’ rather than biological race, it existed in more subtle ways that grew harder to identify, and even more so in the wake of the Civil Rights movement and the end of the legal basis of segregation and disenfranchisement.^[70] Modernity would offer Texas criminal justice officers — now black and white, Native American and Mexican — a more sophisticated form of white supremacy, which Americans in the post-Civil Rights era have yet to challenge successfully in the ways that Du Bois and Wells did in their era.^[71] Like the white supremacy of previous generations and of the lynch mob, this manifestation was deeply implicated in the social formations of the New Deal order and, now, late modernity. The panics of the 1890s saw gruesome waves of lynch violence coupled with the convict lease system; the crises of the 1930s saw the massive expansion of prison systems and legal execution. Since the 1980s, both prison populations and legal executions have seen a steep and vengeful rise in the at times slow, at times rapid, infliction of death, in the newest manifestation of white supremacy.^[72] The dark cloud it casts has shifted, roiled and turned across the past century, but still casts its shadow unequally across the land.